5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world.
(One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short
pieces to the "Paetolian" some time since, which were "respectfully
declined.")
Boston is just like other places of its size;--only, perhaps,
considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior
monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the English
language, it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll tell
you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston.
It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be
drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its
second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we
are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that
which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis
in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
their talent and wealth. I have observed, by the way, that the people
who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each
other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual
basin, or _suction-range_, of one large one, of the pretensions of any
other. Don't you see why? Because their promising young author and
rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the
neighboring big city,--their prettiest girl has been exported to the
same market; all their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding
of glory comes from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.
----Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?--Oh,--an
example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn't you
like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest
consideration I must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old
church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there
an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience
of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their
tomahawks,)--if they have, scattered about, those mighty-square houses
built something more than half a century ago, and standing like
architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose
refluent wave has left them as its monument,--if they have gardens with
elbowed apple trees that push their branches over the high board-fence
and drop their fruit on the side-walk,--if they have a little grass in
the side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,--I
think I could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of
those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may
be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight.
My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most
unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live
in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul,
which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles,
and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the
stars by night.
----Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns?--I don't believe there is much difference. You know how they read
Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?--Well,
they read it
"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"
----Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which
they may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it
always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,--with a
chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up,
so that nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into
a passage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the interior
apartments. The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none
is given with it!
If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the
words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,--_The Lord have mercy
on your soul!_ You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,--or,
if you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in
Melbourne or San Francisco,--or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break
your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about
as if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.
Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door.
The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very
terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or
receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own
flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the
side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have
a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your
sensibilities in semitones,--touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist
strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as
great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman
is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the
great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are
struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument
possesses. A few exercises on it dally at home fit a man wonderfully for
his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them.
No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul;
it takes one that knows it well,--parent, child, brother, sister,
intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many
have them already.
----You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a
frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If
we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should
sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into
our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were
fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming
round these women's hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white
breasts beneath the laces!
A very simple _intellectual_ mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch
tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about
with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand, and is not
a repeater, nor a musical watch,--though it is not enamelled nor
jewelled,--in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required
for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful
hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble
they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to
genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not
subject to the spasms and crises that are so often met with in creative
or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or
friendship.--Observe, I am talking about _minds_. I won't say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the
understanding and reason;--but, on the other hand, that the brain often
runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages
of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
happy, I have no question.
If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all,
if we think of it, most of the world's loves and friendships have been
between people that could not read nor spell.
But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod, which absorbs all
that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles
or the pressure of hand or lip,--this is the great martyrdom of
sensitive beings,--most of all in that perpetual _auto da fé_ where
young womanhood is the sacrifice.
----You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
friendships of illiterate persons,--that is, of the human race, with a
few exceptions here and there. I like books,--I was born and bred among
them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a
stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as
companions or as instructors. But I can't help remembering that the
world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great
scholars great men. The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think,
if any; yet they represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of
manhood, and, I think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of
letters next Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.
What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which
every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
----I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,--said the
divinity-student,--who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,--I replied,--the man who is never conscious of any
state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression
by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can
hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the
power of music. The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the
Professor tells me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow, just
where it is widening to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its
seat in the region of sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces
a continuous and, as it were, logical sequence of emotional and
intellectual changes; but how different from trains of thought proper!
how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!--Think of human passions as
compared with all phrases! Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by
the reading of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because
Desdemona was maligned? There are a good many symbols, even, that are
more expressive than words. I remember a young wife who had to part with
her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she
was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she
quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people
in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest
experiences,--namely, to waste away and die. When a man can _read_, his
paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can _read_, his thought has
slackened its hold.--You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an
expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common
person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise
above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's
reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's
reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs
from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above--not the author, but the reader's mental version of the
author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into
exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may
drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words.
We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless
there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we,
dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass
of earthly intelligences.
----I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it
becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind,
before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts
and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, _strike in_, as they
say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.
I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day
of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of
births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs
and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were
ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment
send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the
essences ever distilled.
----Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere?--No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my
rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and
listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.
----Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a
good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind.
Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a
year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last,
you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has
domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at home,--entered into
relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole
fabric of the mind. Or take a simple and familiar example. You forget
a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any effort to
recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and
unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought,
and the name rises of itself to your lips.
There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.
----I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that
exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly
dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once
lived might think I was drawing their portraits.
----Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don't know whether the
piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural
History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description.
At any rate, when I gave my translation to B.F. to turn back again into
French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in
English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local
bearing or other,--which the author, of course, didn't mean, inasmuch as
he could not be acquainted with anything on this side the water.
[The above remarks were addressed to the schoolmistress, to whom I
handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came
and read over her shoulder,--very curious, apparently, but his eyes
wandered, I thought. Seeing that her breathing was a little hurried and
high, or _thoracic_, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched
her a little more closely.--It is none of my business.--After all, it
is the imponderables that move the world,--heat, electricity,
love.--_Habet_.]
This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
French, such as you see here; don't expect too much;--the mistakes give
a relish to it, I think.